Advances in curriculum: The National Consortium for Multicultural Education for Health Professionals

Participants of this workshop will learn of new educational resources developed by the National Consortium for Multicultural Education for Health Professionals.  Challenges encountered when developing and delivering cultural competency and health disparities education/training will be presented as well as ways we have overcome them. Some of the challenges that Consortium members have encountered and overcome include: obtaining funding to support faculty, finding a voice in the curriculum, keeping the momentum, accessing communities and skills to engage communities, integrating and embedding cultural competency into the curriculum, and negotiating with difficult/passive-agressive/obstructive personalities in leadership positions. Measures of success for the Consortium will be shared as well as advances in evaluation of cultural competency and health disparities curriculum.  Examples of newly developed resources include self-awareness exercises, a case-based textbook of discussion guides for the Unnatural Causes video series, a web-based video production, and faculty development guides. Participants will learn of an assessment and revision of the AAMC’s Tool for Assessing Cultural Competency Training (TACCT), assessment of Medical Spanish courses taught in medical schools, and real-time evaluation of physicians working effectively with interpreters. Workshop participants will be provided with training and education materials that they can immediately use at their respective institutions.

The National Consortium for Multicultural Education for Health Professionals is a new research initiative to develop and evaluate cultural competence curriculum for medical students, physicians and other health care professionals. The Consortium is a collaborative effort of eighteen US medical schools, and funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The main goal of this initiative is to increase the overall knowledge and skills of medical students, house staff, and other professionals, including practicing physicians on the ethnic, cultural, religious, socioeconomic, linguistic and other factors that contribute to health disparities, and on culturally competent approaches to mitigating these disparities. Members of the Consortium are leaders in cultural competence education, and are partnering with key organizations such as the AAMC, the California Endowment, and the DHHS OMH to develop, implement, evaluate and disseminate cross-institutional cultural competence education projects over an eight year period. Each initiative will augment the individual institutional efforts of the members and culminate in the dissemination of innovative, effective curricula in cultural competence. The evaluation of these curricula will incorporate robust evaluation methods in order to measure the impact of our educational efforts across health care disparities.